The Importance of Customer Experience

Sure, brands with innovative products or a cohesive aesthetic are cool, but if you dig to the centre of great customer experience you’ll find that it all begins with how the brand makes you feel. Perhaps it’s an inspiring promotions video or a pain-free return process. Whatever it is that effectively connects a customer to your brand, it all constitutes an experience. Because a large portion of today’s consumer pool is made up of Millennials who are more concerned with meaningful experiences than expensive products, customer experience is where true industry leaders leave the competition in the dust.

Brands that successfully deliver great customer experiences do so with a plan. They work to understand their customers and their needs. They track customer journeys and examine every point at which a customer comes in contact with the brand. They build the best teams of people, combining the skills, attitudes and knowledge required to get the customer experience just right.

If you’re not quite sure of exactly what you need in order to enhance the customer experience of your brand, you’ve come to the right place! However, it would be more useful to think about this in terms of who you need, rather than what. You don't have to be Apple to get this right - you just need to surround yourself with the right kinds of people. It is people who make a business after all.

Customer experience professionals are tasked with a role that is constantly subject to change based on the wills of their customer base. And so, they should excel in certain areas and have certain skills that differ from traditional marketers. Yes, they will still need that all-important creative spark, as well as the ability to turn customer data into action. They will also need a decent helping of both adaptability and autonomy. But, above most other traits, customer empathy and intuition are crucial – to really understand what the customer needs, you need to be able to put yourselves in the their shoes!

While the people you employ are immensely important, the rapid developments in technology over the last few decades are a major consideration in the customer experience building process. The internet and all the ways that it has allowed us to connect with one another, it has never been easier to publicly voice an opinion - whether that opinion be positive or negative. Thankfully, this also makes it far easier to find out what your current and potential customers think and, subsequently, want.

With that comes the requirement for specialist talent to help you design a seamless customer experience online. It might sound obvious, but the first and most important step is being authentic. In a world full of bots and impersonal advertising plugs, people don't want robotic or scripted responses - they want to talk to a human. With so many business overlooking this crucial step, prioritising it can really set your brand apart from the crowd.

There was a time when the customer and their needs weren’t even a blip on the radar of what a business would consider before releasing their product out into the world. During the industrial era, products were in such demand that there was a mindset of, “If you build it, they will come.” Now, businesses do not have that luxury. There are just too many alternatives available. The customer experience is now more important than ever, and it will continue to grow as the world becomes more and more product saturated and customers become increasingly interconnected.

A positive customer experience is much more likely to lead to happier customers and good word-of-mouth marketing. This will in turn lead to customers with considerably greater lifetime values. However, as relationship marketing is still adjusting to the new social era, customer experience is often tackled without a full understanding of customer behaviours and expectations. Rather than trying to convince your customers to change their behaviours to fit your model, organisations need to be aligning their processes with their customers’ expectations. This cohesive relationship dynamic begins with putting the right people in contact with your customers - trust me, they’ll thank you for it!